Lord Browne
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 July 2006
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the chief executive of BP, John Browne. His father had also worked for the company and through visits to Iran as a boy, he witnessed spectacular oil-well blow-outs which gave him a fascination for the business. He joined BP after leaving university, starting at the sharp end as a petroleum engineer in Alaska in the 1970s. For 20 years, he travelled the world, working his way up the ladder before permanently settling in London.
Almost 10 years ago, he said that oil companies must take seriously the threat of global warming and take measures to tackle the issue. He was knighted in 1998, and created a life peer in 2001 as Lord Browne of Madingley.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a businessman for more than 10 years now. He's been running one of the world's largest oil companies |
| 0:37.2 | supervising its growth from a 20 billion pound organization into one worth more than 130 billion. His success may be due in part to the fact |
| 0:46.2 | that the company itself is almost part of his DNA. He's never worked for any other, |
| 0:51.4 | joining it after leaving Cambridge where he saw his first-class |
| 0:54.4 | degree as a stepping stone into the commercial rather than the academic world. |
| 0:59.1 | His father too had worked for the same firm. |
| 1:01.8 | And so with single-minded determination he set about |
| 1:04.4 | building a career that has made him one of this country's most unusual company |
| 1:08.1 | men. His lifestyle is not necessarily what one would expect from such a high |
| 1:12.2 | achiever. He lived quietly alone |
| 1:14.1 | with his mother until she died six years ago. But then as he says, while people like |
| 1:19.0 | to get together with individuals like themselves, life is more complicated. |
| 1:23.5 | We're all brought together to do different things. |
| 1:26.4 | He is the chief executive of BP Lord Brown, John Brown. |
| 1:30.0 | It's pretty unusual, though these days, John, to spend one's whole working lifetime with one company. |
| 1:35.8 | Was that a conscious decision? |
| 1:37.2 | You must have been headhunted, courted, time and again. |
| 1:40.3 | No, it wasn't a conscious decision. |
| 1:42.0 | I almost started by accident because I took a sabbatical |
| 1:46.0 | from Cambridge and decided to go and work under pressure for my father, who asked me a question |
... |
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